Compulsory for lorry drivers

Price drop

"Samsung reckons its enterprise SSD prospects are good, quoting Gartner numbers claiming worldwide SSD units and revenues for enterprise application will grow from 324,000 units and U$485m in 2009 to 6.3 million units and U$3.6bn in 2014."

Which means lowering the average price per drive from $1400+ to a more palatable $571

New strorage paradigm ...

I think that the future storage will be of two types :

1 - Direct into PCI storage modules, allowing the speed of nearly direct system bus interface, as a substitute of actual disk drives. After all it is a waste of resources having to serialize your data requests, send them on a wire, to get them decoded to a memory, send the data back, and then copied to antoher memory.

Just interface the flash memory directly. Your processor will see its lower nGb of dram, and then a hige space of nGb of directly addressable flash memory. Get rid of the layers between them.

CE Tagging

The CE tag is _self issued_, meanig that you as a manufacturer had done all the ccontrols and measurements to assure it.

If you've not done it, you're obliously lying, and emmiting a false certificate, so you can be prosecuted.

Here in Catalunya (Spain), the ploice checks from time to time the documentation of the wares sold, and there is a very simple mechanism for the user to complain. Once there is a complaint a full review and/or test must be made. If the manufacturar/importer is found guilty, all the affected wares are retired from the market and a fine imposed.

Weigth of the tether

To reduce the weigth of the tether, which is mostly the conductor metal, the only thing needed to do is reduce the conductor diameter.

To cope with the increased wire resistance, there are 2 alternatives ( non excluding)

1 - Use a better conductor ( gold ) or a superconductor (just find one that works at room temperatures)

2 - Increase the line voltage, as to reduce the intesnsity to carry the same power. Of course the isolation will have to be enhaced, but plasitc is a lot less dense, even more if is filled with vacuum bubbles.

Head view

Warp speed

I'd like to resalt the fact that warp speed, as seen in Star Trek films, exceeds c, so there have to be different physics involved, thank you.

Primary, the branch that studies fictional physics.

Of course, that don't invalidates the professor's study, that is applicable to our very real world, and if I one day happen to be flying in a spaceship fast enough to nottice its effects, i'll fondly remeber him.

On the other way, there are far more bigger problems to get to such speed, as the acceleration needed would be far greater than the one my body would resist, for example, or the amount of energy involved to accelerate the ship.

One beer to a time well spent in an important problem, as I'm doing now.

Liquid coolant

Water ?

Why not use R410A or other non conductive, non toxic, non corrossive industrial refrigerant and rid themselves of the pipes. Just pump the coolant in one side of the stack, let it flow while evaporating and collect the resultant hot gas on the other side. No pipes, just small expanding holes etched in the surface of the bottom chip, one quick connect pipe socket in each side of the module, and you're ready to go.

Use one compressor for all paralel chips, and get the efficiencies in moving heat associated with het pump aircon systems.

Going the Apple way

I was mulling the possibility of moving our small office to apple hardware, because of the 'Just Works' moniker, and the (at least on paper), perceived good value of the iMac i7 machines.

Of clourse, that would pave the way to purchase Apple software, and use iPhones

Then, as the decision times are looming ... the tide of reports of faulty hardware ( DOA iMacs ), bad customer experience, and closed environement for the sotware is making me reconsider the whole thing.

Probably we'll continue as we are now, purchasing build to order PCs from our friendly local store, with Debian, and perhaps, money permiting, some of those 30in HP displays, which, after all, is the MOST important part of any interactive computer (servers and embedded do not need no stinkin' displays)

Pitty, i was willing to play with a Snow Leopard .... and face it against a penguin ... but seems the Leopard has defaulted.

Little Bobby Tables

Regenerative Braking

The huge energy saving from an electric car comes from regenerative braking.

In an open road, where you almost don't have to brake, there isn't nay gain, but while driving in a city, you will get a big gain when braking for all those semaphore lights.

In an ICE, the kinetic energy will be just dissipated as heat.

In an ICE, the engine will consume power while at the red light.

Also there is a far better way to storing power : flywheel. Just isn't as cool and adaptable as batteries. You have to design the car around the flywheel, and not the other way. There are other difficulties with a flywheel, but are all solvable with the current technology and some cunning.

The only problem is that you need a 1'8m wide, 500kg flywheel at 15.000 rpm to store a fuel tank of energy. I made the numbers.

DIY hipobaric chamber

Get a piece of concrete pipe big enough for your needs, put a thick ( > 30mm) metacrilate circle on both ends, one end attached with some flexible cement (poliuretane may be a good choice, the other end justa a rubber ring.

On the fixed plate, insert a fitting, and ask your local air conditioning guy to lend the vacuum pump to evacuate the air.

Envelope the concrete with plastic film to seal it.

When ready to go, insert model into chamber, engage the pump, hold the rubber ring end until pressure starts to drop and observe the effects from a safe distance.

If the chamber can be smaller, a bottle with a big mouth may be easier.

You can also evacuate air with pirotechnically assisted methods, bur are trickier.

And for the electronics, i reaffirm myself that a HTC Dream / Hero is the way to go, beacuse it has it all included and tested, so you ONLY need to write the software (he he he).

Technical data:

Energy :

To get energy to the electronics in the plane, you can use a pair of small propeller blades attached to a pair of dinamos, that will recharge a small battery, so you will use the dinamos as a way to reduce the amount of kinetic energy, and power the electronics and, possibly, actuators.

Excess energy to heat the electronics enclosure.

Computer control:

As a computer control, you can use an HTC Dream, with android, that has accelerometer, magnetic field sensor, wifi, gps, compass, video camera, is fully hackable, and you have the source code. Should be relatively easy to hack a usb device to control the surfaces of the plane, using PWM and electromagnets. Log all data to the 8Gb microSD card, that propably will survive a fatal crash, flushing the filesystem every 1s. The program for controlling the surfaces don't need to be too sophisticated, as will be using closed loop sevos with the set points controlled by the GPS. The accelerometer can be used as the D paramenter in a PID algorithm.

Stability of the system can be easy to verify with a couple of equations, if needed, but much more fun to launch the plane from the roof.

Altitude sensor:

In addition to the GPS and accelerometer on the phone, you can use a small balloon, that will activate a switch when the outside air pressure drops enough.

Separation device:

Use an electromagnet inside the plane, attached to a piece of iron hanging from the balloon, that will be unpowered on command from the phone and will use the mechanical altitude sensor as a failsafe (serial installation). D Cell battery powered.

Recommended design flow:

1 - Specify hardware needed for the system.

( Just draw a diagram with names. )

2 - Calculate hardware weigth.

( Group all the parts, and put them into a kitchen scale. )

3 - Calculate wing span for plane + 2 x hardware weigth.

4 - Model airplane in X-Plane simulator, while the computer hack is preparing the programs, and the HW hack is preparing the rest of the hardware.

Reversed logos

I'm wiling to let my desktop TRIPLE that time

As the title said, i'll be grateful if my desktop can become fully functional in 3 seconds. So I'll be able to do a halt at nigth after backups, and not having to cope with an uptime of months because of the wasted time in the morning.

I'ts time we get rid of the compressed kernel image, and start using more compiled in drivers. Memory and disk are cheap enough.